La Légende des Siècles eBook

L. 232. Zoroastre. Zoroaster was the founder
of the Persian religion.
He was a great observer of the stars.

L. 245. Fatalite. In Victor Hugo the word
denotes, not so much destiny, as the feeling or the
doctrine that man is the helpless victim of an unseen
and cruel power. It is a gloom which overhangs
human life, from which in the progress of the ages
man will be delivered. Compare La Vision d’ou
sortit ce livre, where the spirit of ‘Fatalite’
is associated with paganism and contrasted with the
spirit of religion. In Dieu again ‘Fatalite’
is one of the three sombre deities of paganism, the
other two being Venus, the goddess of pleasure, and
Hecate, the goddess of death. Cf. also the following
lines from La Fin de Satan, put into the mouth
of man’s evil angel:—­

Man is likened to a convict, in that he is undergoing
punishment, not in that he deserves it.

Allioth, a star of the first magnitude in the
Great Bear.

J’en arrive: ’Tis from there
I come.

la pesanteur. Gravity symbolizes the forces
which keep man down.

guebres, fire-worshippers, i.e. the Persians,
who still adhere to the ancient religion of Zoroaster.
The word itself is Persian.

Thales (English Thales), one of the seven wise
men of Greece.

L. 317. An allusion to the well-known doctrine
of the music of the spheres, enunciated by Plato.

chouette. The owl, as a bird of darkness,
was to Hugo suggestive of evil things. Cf. La
Confiance.

frisson des roseaux, i.e. a trembling
like that of reeds.

Spinosa (English Spinoza) (1632-77), the Jewish
philosopher, whose rationalistic views would be evidence
to Hugo of his need of faith.

Hobbe. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the
famous English philosopher, is best known by his defence
of absolute monarchy. In ethics he held that
man is swayed only by the desire for pleasure and the
fear of pain. Either of these views would be
to Hugo a system of despair.